We can’t begin this week without mentioning museum staff who are among the many U.S. Government workers furloughed for a month. Words aren’t worth much, but we feel for you. We often whine on these pages about low pay, but you’re in the land of no pay, and we wish the shutdown would end. It’s likely cold comfort, but we’re proud AAMD offers a list of museums across the country offering government workers free admission. If you are among the federal workers currently out of work, check this out: a state by state list of free admission.

Based on last week’s post–a back-and-forth between Frank Vagnone and me –I thought maybe we should talk about governing boards. If you’re a leader they’re the people you probably see a lot of–some weeks maybe too much. They are the deciders. They may exercise that obligation too frequently or not often enough. They may fret about capital expenses, about decaying infrastructure, about risk, but–if you’re a leader, here’s a question for you–does your board worry about staff? Or is the staff your problem? You and your leadership team hire them, nurture them, and, if need be, fire them. What does your board know about them?

Here are some questions for you and your board:

For you, the museum leader:

Do you know what it costs to live in your county, city or town? Not what it costs you, what it costs your lowest paid full-time employee.

Do you know what the living wage is for your locale?

Do you know the ratio between your salary and your lowest paid FTE?

What benchmarks do you use to set salaries?

Do you know whether your organization’s salaries are equitable or not? Does your museum or heritage organization have a race/gender pay gap?

What is the racial and ethnic makeup of your board? How does it affect the board’s decision making? How does it affect the community’s view of your organization? Is that something your board has discussed?

Have the words “implicit bias” ever been mentioned at a board meeting? If so, what happened?

Have you and your board tried any of the following:

Have you talked about wage equity as a serious and ongoing problem in the museum world?

Have you addressed the costs of hiring, replacing and retraining staff?

Do you and your board know what it’s like to live in your community on the lowest hourly wage your organization offers?

Do you pay men more than women? Do you pay white staff more than staff of color? And that’s not a question about your personal beliefs, it’s about what actually happens.

Has your board and your organization come to consensus on a values statement?

These are complex problems. Board and staff have to believe in change to make it happen.

Board and staff are co-dependent. Make sure you have the right people on the staff and on the board. Acknowledge the importance of each team, board and staff.

Make your meetings about doing rather than reviewing. Plan, reflect, strategize.

There are museums without walls, without collections, but there are almost none without staff. Paid or volunteer, staff carry out mission and reflect the museum’s values every day. Boards and leaders who don’t invest in staff and volunteers equitably, preside over a a work and volunteer force that’s disaffected, dissatisfied and discouraged.

Find hope and optimism. If staff feels victimized, the solution isn’t to hire new staff, it’s to find the source of their victimization, and correct it.

Don’t let yourself fall into the scarcity mindset: the pie is as big as you choose to make it.

Leadership Matters writes a lot about salaries, and this week a question on Facebook deserves a closer look. Our colleague, Franklin Vagnone, President and CEO of Old Salem Museum and Gardens in Winston Salem, NC, asked a group of museum colleagues if they knew anything about the ratio between nonprofit CEO pay and staff salaries. Because it’s Facebook, Frank got a lot of comments, but no definitive answers.

Considering that salaries in general, and CEO salaries in particular, are not the stuff of social media conversations, Frank’s question was about as transparent as it comes. In short, he wanted to know what the ratio is between a CEO’s salary and the lowest paid staff member. The numbers for the corporate world are available courtesy of Bloomberg, and range from a frightening 1,205 to 1 to a more modest, yet still dynamic, 133 to 1. But Google the same question for nonprofits and you discover a hot mess. Not to mention, again, no real answers. You’ll find the average ED pay for a US nonprofit hovers between $64,999 to 88,000, but nothing about the salary relationship between leader and staff.

Among the 300 million hits from Google, none of the first three pages offered any answers. There are cautionary articles about making sure nonprofits meet their state’s minimum wage laws, and/or using living wage calculators to set salaries. There are also articles about nonprofit CEO pay and how much might be too much. But neither I nor Vagnone could find anything about adjusting a leader’s salary to make the ratio more equitable.

At Old Salem Museum and Gardens Vagnone and his board have spent the last two years in an equity initiative, making sure all staff receive a living wage as determined for Forsyth County, NC. It’s important to note that a living wage in Forsyth County, North Carolina is NOT a living wage in New York City or San Francisco or Allegany County, Maryland. Living wages reflect, among other things, cost of living, thus locations with high rent, taxes, food costs, and transportation by necessity have a higher living wage than places where the cost of living is lower.

“My goal is not to put my thumb on other people, and keep their pay low. It’s the opposite,” Vagnone said. “Nonprofits are collaborative entities, and we all should be able to be equitably compensated based on experience and skill.” Vagnone and his board use various comparables such as the AAM National Museum Salary Survey along with salary information from similar North Carolina sites, but these don’t confront the issue of CEO pay versus the lowest FT employee ratio. “Nonprofit boards are usually populated with corporate executives,” Vagnone said. “They come to nonprofit pay from the for-profit perspective. In some cases, boards are not always in tune with organizations they manage,” Vagnone added.

After talking through the problem, here is a mash-up of Vagnone’s and my take-aways:

Someone needs to do some research on this for the museum world and make it available.

Solving this isn’t an entirely numeric issue. It’s also an ethical issue.

Boards and CEO’s need to make sure they’ve dealt with the living wage/equitable wage problem for all staff.

CEO’s/ED’s salaries need to have an ethical and reasonable relationship to staff’s. Those numbers will differ based on a huge number of variables including museum location, operating budget, availability and size of endowment(s), number of staff, and museum discipline, but boards and leaders should be intentional about the ratio.

It’s important that boards and executive directors work staff salaries in an ethical direction.

Has your organization tackled this problem? If so, what was the result?

It’s a new year. For many it’s a time of resolutions. Eating healthier, exercising more, seeing friends, meditation, top lists of things we hope to do. But how about work? And most particularly how about work in your museum or heritage organization? What’s on the list there? Well, everyone wants a raise, but here’s another thought: How about owning what you do? How about making your work matter to you and your organization?

My grandmother–a woman of enormous independence for someone raised at the turn-of-the-last century–used to describe particular individuals with a sigh and pronounce, “She’ll only go as far as she’s pushed.” Needless to say, this was not a compliment. What she valued were individuals who not only completed whatever was assigned, but went a step further, as opposed to humans who had to be corralled into work, completing it without an ounce of extra thought or energy.

Why do my grandmother’s thoughts matter? Because, like her, employers, even at museums and heritage organizations where the sense of urgency is sometimes absent, prefer proactive rather than reactive staff. There is a laziness–maybe born of anger or job dissatisfaction–that allows staff to say things like “That’s not my job,” or “She didn’t tell me to do that so I’m not doing it,” or “He’ll be angry if I go ahead, so better to wait.”

Yes, you may work for someone who is an epically bad communicator, but it’s your career that’s at stake here, not hers. And while you’re thinking about this, know that according to a recent study, a shocking 37-percent of managers have no clue what their staff is working on. That means more than a third of employees can be on a permanent coffee break as long as they appear to be engaged in some form of activity. So…if you work for an individual you suspect may have no clue about your day-to-day work life, much less your career, here are some things you may want to contemplate.

If you don’t already have a standing appointment with your boss, make one.

Outline your day, hour-to-hour, and quantify percentages so you (and your boss) can see how much of your time is spent on what.

Talk about prioritizing. Maybe you do a lot of nice things–maybe you’re the person who cleans out the volunteer break room or restocks the education space–and it’s nice, but you’re underutilized. You do it because others don’t, but it means you’re not doing things nearer and dear to your heart or your job description. And if you’re underutilized, you may be busy, but you’re likely not happy or challenged.

Evaluate whether you’re reactive or proactive. Talk with your boss about how that could or should change. Own your goals and push for them.

And if you’re a leader, think about:

How you communicate. Are tasks poorly executed because what staff heard was mushy and confusing? Do you ever ask “Did I explain that well enough?”

Listen to your staff. Watch for signs of distress. Is one job full of responsibility but no authority? Does everything have to be checked with a higher power–like you? Are other staff showing signs of boredom? Are deadlines met in five seconds?

Check-in often. Remember, check-ins don’t have to be formal. You can check-in in the hall or an office doorway, but they need to be meaningful. You need to have the time to focus and remember what your last conversation was about.

Set deadlines and keep them. Is there a sense they matter because it will take your staff about a nanosecond to realize if deadlines don’t matter to you, they don’t need to matter to them.

Know whether your staff is challenged or not. A recent study by Salary.com showed that more than 50-percent of employees were either not challenged or bored at work so ask yourself whether you really know what’s going on.

Work can’t be a bowl of cherries every day, but presumably many of us picked the museum field because we love it. We love collections or collections care or exhibition design or research or brilliant social media or school groups. In a world where development departments work double time nobody should be bored, unchallenged or feel they can’t move forward on a given project because they don’t have the autonomy. It’s January and a natural time for change.

Looking Back

Thank you to our 875 Leadership Matters followers around the world and thousands more readers who looked at our pages a remarkable 55,300 times in 2018. And just in case you are new to Leadership Matters, here are our five most popular posts for 2018.

Appointments of Linda Harrison as President and CEO of the Newark Museum; Kaywin Feldman as the National Gallery of Art’s fifth director and Anthea Hartig as the first woman director of the Museum of American History, plus many others — the diverse list of directors and curators is growing and, for that, we are very inspired!

The men and women attending the AASLH Leadership Forum this year and our colleague, Greg Stevens, with whom we developed and led the Forum’s agenda.

Looking Forward: Where to Find Us in 2019

February 5, 2019, Baylor University, Waco, Texas: Where we will deliver the Largent Lecture on the topic of women in the museum workplace.

Two Webinars for the Office of Programs and Outreach at the Wisconsin Historical Society: Leadership Matters: Thoughts on 21st-Century Museum Leadership, January 30 and Women in Museums on March13, 2019

This is for all the museum women out there because, to be honest, you do a crap job of taking care of yourself.

It’s almost the end of the year. If you’re in academia, you’re either taking exams, finishing papers or grading them. If you work in development, it’s the annual nail biter where you find out if people like your organization more than last year. For some of you it’s budget season or planning season or holiday no-school programming season. Wherever you look it’s stressful. And somehow we women are excellent at owning stress–ours and everyone else’s. Why is that?

As we reach toward the third decade of the 21st century, you might imagine that for women at work things might be better than they were 70 years ago. Not really. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 74.6 million women work, an increase of 24-percent since WWII; 40-percent of women in the workforce have college degrees; and one in three lawyers are women. Okay, you say, what’s so bad about that? It sounds like progress. And it is except that: Women are the primary or sole earners for 40-percent of households; women are more likely to stop working to care for an elderly family member; the United States is the only industrialized country without a national paid leave policy for mothers; and women are paid less. According to the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project,“after adjusting for factors like labor force experience, union status, race and ethnicity, and occupation, much of the gender wage gap remains unexplained, suggesting that labor market discrimination plays an important role. In fact, almost 60 percent of women would earn more if they were paid the same as men with equivalent levels of education and work hours.” All of that is stressful, and that is before you add in the peculiarities of individual circumstance.

Last week our students completed emotional budgets. Essentially they are maps of what’s going on in your life. They chart how you spend your time. They are as different as the people who make them. Some are computer generated pie charts that could have come from Google. Others are the size of wall maps and decorated with glitter. Why do them? Sometimes it’s useful to put your life down in color and confront the fact that if 50-percent of your time goes to your soul-sucking job, 25-percent to being a parent; 20-percent to partner and home, then there is a measly 5-percent left over for you.

And don’t think it doesn’t matter. We all need more than 5-percent. Life is challenging and so are museums. That’s part of why we like working in them. But poor self care makes you mean, and sometimes cranky, and if you’re not nice at work you get a reputation for impatience and snappishness. So what to do? Here are five things to think about as we roll toward the end of 2018.

You need to take care of yourself. You, your family, and your friends will all benefit from a happier, healthier you.

Put your health first. Somehow women don’t. It’s something embedded in our DNA that says, I can do this. My temperature is only 101. I haven’t pick one: (thrown up, cried, coughed up a lung) for at least an hour. No you can’t. Stay home. Ask for help. Take care of yourself.

Give yourself some alone time. Even if it’s only a short walk in the middle of a work day, take time alone. Let your thoughts settle. Regroup.

My mother used to have a little note near her phone. This was the era of landlines so the phone never moved. The note said, “Say no.” I thought it was hysterical, but in retrospect, we all should have that note. It’s your internal monitor that says, I don’t have time, energy or the skillset to do that. (It also might say, I’m not going to enable you, you do it.) It’s a learned skill to say no nicely, and not to judge yourself for bowing out.

Make a tiny change. Promise yourself that in the coming year you will do something different that’s just for you. Don’t make it so grandiose that it feels impossible, make it doable. Try a new recipe once a month. Walk every day that it’s sunny. Read a poem before bed. Whatever floats your boat and is for you.

And last, be helpful and supportive to your women colleagues at work. Everyone has bad days. Learning to shoulder stress, individually and as a team, is part of leadership.

Joan Baldwin

P.S. Leadership Matters will be on vacation next week (December 24-30). It will return Jan. 2 with some wishes for the New Year.

This week in discussion with our Johns Hopkins class we asked students about threats to 21st-century museums. While there were outliers who mentioned the lack of leadership training, poor pay, and becoming a pink collar field, the vast majority felt diversity was today’s biggest challenge. And by diversity, they meant its absence. This group is young, hopeful, largely female, and mostly Caucasian, yet they see our field as riddled with white, male patriarchy.

To be totally transparent, we here at Leadership Matters are older, white, straight and female. We occupy a weird nether-world that has trouble claiming a demographic silo so there may be some who bristle when we write about diversity and leadership. But as people who’ve watched the museum world, and particularly museum leadership, for a long time, we believe this field is overdue for change. And creating diversity by checking boxes–one handicapped staff member plus one LGBTQ person, plus one person of color, plus one transgender individual equals diversity–is not the answer. In fact, it can result in a lonely group of individuals who are burdened with representing an entire population, and who feel they’ve only been hired because of who they’re not. And who aren’t they? They aren’t your usual Caucasian, privileged, cisgender, straight, liberal-arts college crowd. So what should you do? How about hiringfor the whole not for other-than?

How do you do that? Know your community. That’s your actual community, meaning your museum neighborhood, not the people who come to openings. Know your staff. Know where you want your organization to go, and who your museum cares about. Hire to mirror your forward motion. Hire to create a team, not to check boxes, but make sure you’ve done due diligence in spreading the word. Don’t place one advertisement with your regional museum service program and call it a day. Put the ad in as many places as you can afford and see who you attract.

Be willing to invest some time in the process. Hiring new staff is far more complex than ordering from Amazon, and yet too many organizations treat it in much the same way. They don’t discuss what the new or revised position could or should look like, how it might fit into the organization, and most importantly how one particular position adds to or complements a team. Add to that a boatload of bias, and it’s easy to hire the same old, same old.

When we wrote “Know your staff” above, we really meant it. Even if you work at an organization as big as some small towns, someone knows the group of people you are hiring for. They know whether they interact with the community daily or move entirely behind the scenes. They know whether they’re chummy, go out for drinks together, and finish everything on time but at the last minute or whether they are goal driven and competitive. And they know whether their team really needs a master’s degree or whether a bachelor’s degree and a lot of imagination will move the ball up the field just fine.

If you’re the board and hiring for the ED position, you know what’s on the “to-do” list at the micro and macro level. If you’re making a huge shift, you know you’re going to need someone who will smile and be personable, someone who can sell change. That means you must park your bias at the door. Listen and watch. Again, don’t choose the person who makes you comfortable; choose the person that’s the best fit for the job.

I would be doing us all a disservice if I made it sound as simple as applying good listening techniques. Hiring is a complicated process, where bias, aspiration, hope, and memory frequently clash. AAM offers good resources on how to make the process more open and transparent. Don’t forget too, part of hiring and keeping a diverse staff is to maintain an equitable workplace. Maybe now’s the moment to make sure your 2019 to-do list includes:

a gender pay equity audit.

a values statement–what does your organization believe in back stage away from the public?

an HR/personnel policy that includes a standard of conduct and anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies.

An understanding of what it costs to live in your museum’s neighborhood, city or town.

Know what diversity means in your community. Know who’s not at your table.

Once again, hiring for social media/PR value only nets disappointment and expense. Instead, hire because you want a diverse crowd around your table. Because the diverse crowd is the best crowd and diverse teams are imaginative teams. And who isn’t looking for the dream team?

Choosing a new executive director is a big deal. Whether you’re a teeny tiny historical society or the Metropolitan Museum of Art much rests on the selection of a single human. This week, both in conversations with a colleague, and in class discussion with our Johns Hopkins University students, it became clear that a lot of museums and heritage organizations don’t allow staff to meet the candidates. Too often, that opportunity seems to belong to the board and the board alone.

It’s hard, however, to see how that makes any sense. Admittedly, I work at an organization that’s taken the interview process to extraordinary levels. Except for the lowliest positions, every candidate spends at least five or six hours on site, moving from meeting to meeting, and often participating in the proverbial lunch where she or he is asked to eat while simultaneously answering questions from well-meaning staff. At day’s end, everyone submits evaluations to their direct reports. Could staff really sway a decision? I don’t know, but I can tell you that everyone feels as though they’ve participated. At the very least, they can put a name to a face when the final decision is announced. Why does any of this matter? Because “they,” whether they are a leadership team at a huge organization, or the entire staff at a small one, will be the candidate’s team. And the team is important.

One of the many misconceptions about interviewing is that it’s something that happens toyou. And it does, but it’s not an entirely passive experience, nor should it be. Too often the whole job process feels like a do-or-die proposition. You turn on the charm and hope they pick you out of what must be — in your imagination at least — hundreds of capable applicants. But you’re also interviewing them, whoever they are. And how they come off, especially at a moment when everybody’s on their best behavior, matters. What does it tell you if you spend half a day on site, and never meet the staff? Granted, if you’re interviewing at the American Museum of Natural History, The Henry Ford or the Victoria and Albert Museum, you couldn’t possibly meet many staff. But, at the very least, shouldn’t you meet your future peers and/or direct reports? And what does it say about the board and the leadership if you don’t? At the very least, ask for those opportunities if it appears they aren’t on the agenda. (You never know, the staff could have fruitlessly pushed for meetings. If you ask for and get meetings, you could become the staff’s hero.)

Sometimes organizations can’t seem to get out of their own way. And boards, like an abandoned spouse after a divorce, sometimes hire quickly, frequently selecting a version of the person they just lost, perpetuating a host of organizational ills. So, if you’re a museum board member or a museum leader, and 2019 is going to be your year for an important hire, think about the following:

Know what qualities you’re looking for. Sounds obvious, but these aren’t the standard qualities that every job advertisement lists — courage, vision, intelligence, self-awareness — they are the qualities that will take your museum or heritage organization and move it forward. And they shouldn’t be confused with qualifications. Only you, the board and the museum leadership know what your organization needs. Is it experience as a collaborator with other organizations? Is it the ability to be decisive and carry out a strategic plan? Is it an understanding of how digital and web-based content can impact your organization?

Be open about where you might find this person. It might not be in a traditional spot. Try to shed your biases or at least acknowledge them, and be willing to look outside the box.

If this is the top spot, decide how to engage your leadership team and/or staff. Who will give candidates a tour? Who will meet with them in small groups? Who will answer questions about living in your area?

How can meetings with staff and candidates give you the most bang for the buck, providing information for the interviewee, while also giving staff the opportunity to listen and ask questions?

Does your staff or board need coaching on which questions are legal and appropriate and which are not? A refresher never hurts.

Hiring, particularly for the top spot, is a time-consuming and sometimes expensive process. Presumably, you’re proud of your museum and the work it does. So showcase it. Let candidates meet with staff. Give them a mechanism to report back. Listen. Listen. Listen. Choose wisely. Choose for the team you have and the organization you want.